The Seventh Sense – Scientific American

Long thought to be divorced from the brain, the immune system turns out to be intimately involved in its functioning

For decades anatomy textbooks taught that the two most complicated systems in the body—the brain and the immune system—existed in almost complete isolation from each other. By all accounts, the brain focused on the business of operating the body, and the immune system focused on defending it. In healthy individuals, the twain never met. Only in certain cases of disease or trauma did cells from the immune system enter the brain, and when they did so, it was to attack.

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